


fortune's favorite.

by outpastthemoat



Category: Diana Wynne Jones, Howl Series - Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's Moving Castle - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Spells & Enchantments
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-09 15:07:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16452224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat
Summary: When you are the youngest of three daughters, you tend to assume that things will go your way.  And most of the time, you would be right.





	1. Chapter 1

Things go right for Martha Hatter all the time.  Being the youngest of three daughters, she couldn’t help but have good luck in everything she did.  

"It's not fair!" her older sister Lettie used to cry. "Why should Martha have everything handed to her on a silver platter, just because she's the youngest!"  Her sister Sophie, older than Lettie, had simply looked resigned.  But there did not seem to be anything anyone could do.  It was just how things were in Ingary.  After all, their father used to say while peering over his newspaper, the youngest of three is fortune's favorite.

Once, when she was just a girl, Martha sat down and knitted a sweater for the wandering peddler that passed through Market Chipping.  She felt a bit motherly towards him - something about those red, wind-bitten cheeks.  She simply meant to be kind, for winter was approaching, but when she handed the peddler the sweater, he put it on and promptly ceased being a frail old man with shaggy gray hair and started being a rather good-looking golden-haired young man.  He was still wearing the peddler's ragged trousers and the knitted sweater, but you couldn’t help but look at him and see how lordly he really was.

It became known that the peddler was really the heir of a dukedom south of Kingsbury, and he proposed to Martha on the spot. Martha, only fourteen, had felt alarmed at the offer.  It was not what she wanted at all.

“I’m too young,” she protested.  

“A long engagement, then,” the duke's heir suggested.

“I don't think so,” Martha said firmly, and sent him away.

Things kept going right for Martha, unfortunately.  Martha turned down the duke's heir and her mother was aghast.  He left Martha with the sweater, a ring, and the promise of half his estate when she was of age.  

“I just don’t know what you were thinking,” Fanny kept saying bewilderedly.  "Martha's fortune strikes again," Mr. Hatter had said, and went on reading his newspaper, but Fanny wouldn’t let up about it.  “You may never get a chance like that again!” Martha’s mother lamented.  "Half a dukedom!"

“I just knit a sweater, that’s all,” Martha said, annoyed.  “It’s not even a very good sweater.”

And the truth was that it was not. The other girls in town shook their heads, mystified.  “It had _holes_!” Jane Farrier had been known to point out. Martha held the sweater up to show her mother exactly where she had dropped stitches.  It really was not a very well-made sweater, but that was just the kind of luck Martha kept on having. No matter how well she actually did something, or what her intentions were, she kept on getting noticed just for doing it.

Martha's luck was so good that she would be the one to find a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, find not just a four-leaf clover in a field but six- and seven-leaf clovers, and to make a wish in a well on Midsummer morning and have it come true by midday.  She never tried to do those kinds of things, but they happened regardless, and of course Fanny was always looking for oppurtunities for her.

“Don’t you want to study magic?” her mother asked wistfully.  “Or you could become a lady-in-waiting to a courtier's wife.” And Martha would have to explain again that No, mother, she was just getting ready for her happily-ever-after.  A happily-ever-after, as everyone knows, involved sewing quilts and hemming tablecloths and knitting yards of lace against the day she would set up a house of her own, with a wedding and reception to plan, and when all the planning and homemaking was over and done with, that’s when your life began.  Then there would be the usual yearly cycle of town and Upper Folding festivals to go to, where you would bring several examples of your best recipe for rhubarb pie, and wear ribbons braided in your hair, and dance with your husband and hold the newest village baby on your knee until you were the one with the new baby and all the young girls crowded around you, crowing softly over its soft cheeks and tiny hands.  And it would go on just like so, until one day you looked at your husband and noticed for the first time that he had gray in his beard, and then you looked in the mirror and realized you had become someone else.  

Martha couldn’t wait for her life to begin.  Until then, she felt that she was just twiddling her thumbs and baking cakes to pass the time.  Let Fanny have her oppurtunities.  She had been at loose ends ever since the passing of Mr. Hatter.  Fanny had done well for herself.  She had married Mr. Hatter and considered herself to have been set up in life, and she was always mourning Martha’s wasted oppurtunities to do the same.  But Fanny never seemed to understand that Martha wanted exactly the kind of life Fanny had gotten for herself.  In the end, she had bustled Martha off to Upper Folding to learn witchcraft shortly after Mr. Hatter's passing.  

Then Martha had taken Lettie's apprenticeship at Cesari's pastry shop.  Martha felt she had thoroughly escaped her good fortune.


	2. Chapter 2

As luck would have it, Martha was sent to Upper Folding to learn witchcraft from Mrs. Fairfax. Fanny had arranged it, of course.  

"Just think of all you'll learn!" she said enthusiastically to Martha.  "You'll finally have a chance to use your talents, Martha.  What an opportunity!"

"Think of all you'll learn," Lettie said glumly the night before Martha left for Folding Valley.  Lettie was stuffing ribbons and dresses and stockings inside a pillowcase.  "While I'm getting up before the sun just to stand in front of an oven all day.  For the rest of my life!  It's not fair!"  And Lettie flung her spare shoe into the pillowcase.  Lettie had been apprenticed at Cesari's, the pastry cook in Market Chipping.  Fanny had arranged that, too. 

Now Martha looked at the faint red flush on Lettie's cheeks.  She saw that Lettie was far from resigned to bakery trade.  For her own part, Martha did not like to think of wasting her youth sitting in front of a spellbook, sitting still and studying magic, and then finishing out the terms of her apprenticeship and having to go out in the world and make something of herself.  She supposed she might be able to learn magic, but she was not at all sure she could go on to be a successful magician afterwards.  It would be so much work.  And there was Fanny, and all her hopes and dreams.  Fanny had set her heart on having a witch in the family.  It would hurt her feelings dreadfully if Martha were to fail.       

"No, it isn't fair," Martha said slowly.

"It's not the baking I mind so much," Lettie went on.  "I quite like cooking.  But it seems like my fortune is coming true after all.  If the eldest of three is bound to be a failure and the youngest is bound to be a success, where does that leave me?"

Martha had not considered this before.  "Where  _does_ it leave you, Lettie?" she asked with interest.

Lettie flung the other spare shoe in the pillowcase to follow its mate and flung up her hands.  "Mediocracy!" Lettie fumed.  "Doomed to do nothing more interesting than bake other peoples' wedding cakes, day in and day out, and every day no different than the day before."  She sounded furious about it, but Martha quite liked the sound of it. It  _wasn't_ fair, she thought with growing indignation.  Everything all arranged to Fanny's satisfaction, but not theirs.  After all, she thought suddenly, it is  _my_ fortune.  Shouldn't I have some say in it?

"Lettie," she burst out, "do you ever feel like our fortunes got all mixed up somehow?  I don't want to be a success.  I'd much rather do the same thing day after day, only working for my own keep, and not worrying about living up to my good fortune.  I wouldn't mind mediocracy.  I wish we could change fortunes somehow."

Lettie stopped in the middle of wrestling an apron that was mostly flounces inside the pillowcase.   Her lovely face was alight with mischief.  "Martha," she said, "now that is an excellent idea."

\---

Martha remembered Mrs. Fairfax's house from visits as a child.  She particularly recalled Mrs. Fairfax's study, with the library of spellbooks stretching from wall to wall.  Once, Lettie and Martha had tried a handful of spells from those books in secret. They hadn’t told Sophie. She would have only told Mr. Hatter or Fanny, and anyway Martha and Lettie had known from a very young age that Sophie simply had no use for spellbooks and charms.  She could make anything do what she wanted just by glaring at it.

They had tried charming warts off their fingers - Martha’s idea - and a spell for getting rid of freckles - Lettie’s. Martha recalled that she and Lettie had gotten into quite a lot of trouble over casting those spells.  

Fanny had been aghast. She had threatened to end the visit.  “Girls!” Fanny had raged. “How perfectly dreadful! I might have expected it from you, Martha, trying your luck, but I would have hoped Lettie would have shown more sense.  We are Mrs. Fairfax’s guests!”  Fanny had said all that, and much more like it.

But Mrs. Fairfax had waved away the offense with indulgent fondness.  “Girls will be girls,” said Mrs. Fairfax tolerantly. “Why, when I was their age, I had been caught...”  And so on. Once Mrs. Fairfax got started talking, it was difficult to get her to stop.

In her two weeks at Mrs. Fairfax’s house, Martha learned about the basic properties of magic, how to correctly measure dried and powdered herbs, and how to substitute ingredients when spells that called for mugwort when mugwort wasn’t in season.  There was, Martha thought, a lot about magic that was similar to baking. 

Martha spent her evenings reading through Mrs. Fairfax's library.  She was looking for a particular kind of spell.  This spell had been Lettie's idea.  "And it is a good one," Martha said to herself one evening.  "If I can make it work!"  But her good fortune would probably take care of that, she thought with great relief.  And kept on paging through the spellbooks.

In the end, it hadn’t been hard to find what she was looking for.  Martha had found a spell that would work on the third day. She had just wallked slowly around the library once and stopped, and took out books off a shelf that looked right.  She was particularly drawn to a book with a dark crimson cover and gold-gilt pages. The spell she wanted was the third spell in the first chapter.

What had taken longer was learning enough magic fundamentals from Mrs. Fairfax to learn how to work the spell properly.  Sophie may have always been the most studious, but Martha could learn - when she wanted to.  “You’ve a real gift for this, dear,” Mrs. Fairfax had been saying approvingly about Martha's second attempt at a finding-spell.  "Just keep applying yourself, and see where that takes you!"

"Oh, I won't have to worry about that," Martha said reassuringly.  "I have my good fortune, you know."

"Oh yes," agreed Mrs. Fairfax, "the third child is always fortune's favorite, yes, I have heard that said.  But you shouldn't let that stop you from working at your witchcraft, Martha.  I would not put much stock in destiny's good will.  I quite believe that destiny doesn't have your best interests at heart."

"What is it interested in, then?" asked Martha, with some skepticism.

Mrs. Fairfax looked at her sternly over the top of her glasses.  "A good laugh," she said emphatically.

 

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Martha came home to Market Chipping with two spells. The first spell had been Lettie’s idea, a spell for switching looks. The second spell was one that Martha had come up with on her own.

Martha came home to Market Chipping with two spells.  The first spell had been Lettie’s idea, a spell for switching looks.  The second spell was one that Martha had come up with on her own.

Once Martha had found the spell for switching looks, she kept on reading.  She had kept on reading through Mrs. Fairfax’s books at night, and wrote down all kinds of spells that seemed useful - spells for calming a fussy baby, for lighting fires when no matchsticks or flint could be found, for ensuring twenty minutes of fine weather for an outside reception.  She wrote the ones she liked down on scraps of paper, and then copied them down in the commonplace book Fanny had given her before she left for Folding Village.

Martha kept on reading.  She was looking for another kind of spell.  Something like a love spell, but not that exactly.  Something simple, a spell for finding one’s true love.  Martha looked through every section of Mrs. Fairfax’s library.  But there was nothing at all about love spells in Mrs. Fairfax's books.  

"But she's a witch!" Martha said aloud.  "Don't all witches know love spells?"

But, it seemed, not Mrs. Fairfax.  In the end, Martha had not been able to find another spell that did exactly what she wanted it to do.  So Martha took three or four spells, none of which would work exactly the way she wanted, and put them together to make up a spell all of her own.

“After all,” Martha told herself, “magic _is_ quite like baking.  And I come up with my own recipes all the time.”  

The next part was quite difficult.  It required Martha to spend quite a lot of time looking wistfully out Mrs. Fairfax’s study window at the road that led to Market Chipping and sighing while Mrs. Fairfax tried to explain some otherwise very interesting concepts of herb lore.  

Mrs. Fairfax stopped what she was saying about rosemary as an agent of memory recovery to say, “Martha, are you quite all right?  You have not been yourself lately.”

Martha dragged her eyes off the road just outside that rose up steadily to the hills that closed in the Folding Valley.  “Well,” she said reluctantly, “I just keep thinking about Mother. _You_ know how she is, Mrs. Fairfax.  I just don’t know what she will do without me or Lettie to take care of her.”  

And Mrs. Fairfax agreed that she did know Fanny, and it was only natural to be concerned about one’s recently bereaved mother, and before the day had ended Martha had packed her commonplace book, several jars of honey from Mrs. Fairfax's pantry, and her dresses back in her suitcase and was on the cart back to Market Chipping the next morning.

Martha went past the hat shop and straight for Cesari’s.

"Lettie!" she said.  "I have the spell."

\---

Lettie's face was alight with interest as Martha read the spell out loud, tossing ingredients into the silver bowl she had borrowed from the Cesari’s kitchen.  Two faces peered into the small mirror, Lettie on the right, Martha on the left.  Then Martha said the incantation and closed her eyes.

When she opened her eyes, the face on the left was Martha's, and the face was Lettie's.

The next morning, Lettie put Martha's suitcase in the cart and tied Martha's second-best hat under her chin and pinched Martha's cheeks until they were Lettie's usual lovely rosy color, and jumped up in the front of the cart with the post boy, and Martha waved her goodbye with Lettie's second-best apron tied around her waist and a wide smile across Lettie's face.  

"Now!" Martha said to herself.  "My fortune."  

 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Martha found it hard to be Lettie those first few days. She had to remember to arrange her back hair with Lettie’s special knack, and to laugh like Lettie, loud and cheerful.

Martha found it hard to be Lettie those first few days.  She had to remember to arrange her back hair with Lettie’s special knack, and to laugh like Lettie, loud and cheerful.  She had not realized how hard it would be to take Lettie's place.  She might have Lettie's looks now, but she did not have Lettie's snapping quips for hawking cakes and pastries at the counter, or Lettie's brisk way of rolling out dough.  And she did not know the other apprentices the way Lettie had.  They seemed to all have private inside jokes with Lettie that Martha did not understand.  And she was finding out that she was not used to the quick pace of life at Cesari's after her last quiet, studious two weeks at Mrs. Fairfax's house.

“Lettie! There you are!” said Mrs. Cerasi, finding Martha hovering uncertainly behind the counter.  “Quick, girl, to the bakehouse with you for those fruitcakes! Fancy catching Lettie of all girls lollygagging,” Martha overhead her say to Mr. Cesari.  “She’s always so brisk.”

Martha felt her face flush, to her great annoyance.  She realized that she had spent more time thinking about searching Mrs. Fairfax's library and finding spells than she had considering that once she and Lettie switched places, she would have to actually do the work of a pastry shop apprentice.  She vowed to never let Mrs. Cesari think of her as anything other than brisk and hardworking again.

I am hardworking, I know I am, Martha told herself.  Just because I’m the youngest doesn’t mean I sit around fussing with hair ribbons and dolls! I can work as hard as Sophie or Lettie, I know it.  So she pushed back Lettie's sweat-dampened bangs and smoothed Lettie's back hair and went to work. 

But for the first several weeks at Cesari's, Martha's fortune seemed to be doing everything wrong.  She forgot put of a slip of paper in the oven to test the heat before putting in the sheets of pies and cakes, and so her first batches of plum pudding came out lukewarm, and her first attempts at carrot cake came out burnt and smoldering.  Martha was so busy discovering the meaning of Lettie's jokes and fixing her own careless, very Martha-like mistakes that she did not have a chance to try her own spell for the first two weeks at Cesari's.

When at last she got around to looking at the spells in her commonplace book, she was vexed to find that Cesari’s pantry did not have quite what she needed.  Martha, remembering what she had learned about substitutions at Mrs. Fairfax’s, switched rosemary for angelica, and spun-sugar violets for dried blossoms of love-lies-waiting, and unpacked the jars of Mrs. Fairfax’s red clover honey thankfully.

When she had finished her substituions, she leaned back on her heels and smiled.  One of the spells she had used was originally meant to draw in customers to a business, but she had modified it and used it with another spell from the gold-guilt book one to bring one's lover home safely from war.  Now, Martha thought with satisfaction, anyone in Market Chipping whom she might be able to fall in love with would find a way to come to her, and she could pick from whoever showed up, trusting that anyone who arrived to court her would be someone the spell knew she could fall in love with.  And all she would have to do would be to stay here, and wait.

\---

The spell she cast certainly worked.  The next morning, a cluster of young men surrounded her at the counter.  “Lettie!” they all cried, and jostled around her. “Lettie,” purred a young man, who kept trying to touch her elbow.    

“Lettie, I’d like a cream cake and also to escort you home,” demanded another young man with a prosperous look.  Young men packed the pastry shop so thoroughly there was no room to turn around.  

At first, she didn’t quite like it.  What have I done! she thought. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they hadn’t crowded her so.  But after a day or so she got used to the jostling and the noise, and Martha began to enjoy selling cakes and pies to the young men.  Most of the young men were quite agreeable and fairly good-looking, as well. But Martha had not liked any of them particularly until she had seen Michael.

He had been quite polite to her, even though he had to shout to be heard over the other men jostling around them.  "A cream cake, please," he had bellowed. He was dark of hair and skin, and worn good clothes. He looked as though he was an apprentice, like Martha herself.  He was young. Martha found herself looking for him in the crowd of young men every day, but he only came every once and a while.  She was not quite sure why she looked for him so often.  All the other young men swarmed her at the counter, wrote her lines of poetry, handed her bouquets of lilies and orange blossoms, offered her ruby earrings and ostrich-feather-trimmed hats and pearl rings and lace-edged hankerchiefs.  One young man took to sitting outside the Cesari's dormitories at night, playing love songs on his guitar. The songs were quite romantic.  Martha liked them.  She liked the gifts, too, though it seemed wrong to take them.  She did not want to seem like she was encouraging favorites just yet.  But she admired the lilies and orange blossoms, and offered her sincere appreciation of the rubies and pearls and other gifts.  Michael did not sing her songs or recite her poetry or offer her gifts.  It might have been, Martha admitted to herself, that it was simply because Michael was so much more interesting than the other young men.  

It had been that time, early in her first few weeks, that Martha had come out to the counter carefully balancing a tray of shepherd's pies on her shoulders, and promptly knocked into Nellie, another apprentice, sending the shepherd's pies cascading off the tray and splattering onto the floor.

"Oh no!" cried Martha as she stood there in a puddle of soggy carrots and mashed potato and dough.

"Oh no!" said Nellie, and ducked out of the bakery before anyone could ask her to help.

"Oh, no," said Michael, from where he was waiting patiently by the counter to be helped.  He had been there for quite a while, but Martha had not yet noticed him.  It must have been because he wasn't reciting poetry.  "I can help- I'm a wizard!"

"You are?" Martha asked, impressed.  She watched with interest as Michael blew on his fingers a tad nervously and shook out his hands. 

"Well, a wizard's apprentice," admitted Michael.  "I've never tried this spell on my own.  But it worked just fine at the castle last week when I broke the eggs.  Here-"  And to Martha's amazement, some of the carrot-and-potato sludge on the floor began to trickle slowly towards to the front door.  She and Michael stood there for the next twenty minutes or so and watched the sludge slowly dripping out of the bakery and down the cobblestones of Main Street. 

"Couldn't it go a little faster?" Martha asked respectfully.  Michael shook his head. 

"It's a very complex spell," he explained, "and if I try to speed it up it, there's no telling what will happen." 

"Oh!" said Martha.  And they waited until the last of the remnants of shepherd's pie trickled away.  The floor was still rather sticky, so Michael went to fill the bucket with water and helped Martha mop the stickiness up. 

After that, Martha always noticed Michael when he showed up at Cesari's counter.  After all, she told herself, a wizard's apprentice was bound to be interesting.  


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It turns out that baking was quite a lot like magic indeed. It was as Mrs. Fairfax had often told her - it's the practice more than talent that makes a witch a witch. Martha kept baking, and some of her creations were staring to get some notice.

Martha had always found it difficult to be still.  Even as a girl, she liked to be up and moving, helping the Hatter's maid to peel carrots and potatos or running around underfoot inside the hat shop.  She seemed to do her best thinking when she was doing something else.  Even when she must sit down, she always found herself twiddling her thumbs round and round like tops. 

She found that working at a pastry shop meant she was could never stand still for very long, but she did not mind that at all.  Such a lot of things happened that it was impossible to become bored.  Martha baked and learned how to trade cheerful remarks with the young men that kept on lining the counters, and Martha baked and let Michael help her sweep up the pastry shop at night, and bring her small handfuls of the wild flowers that grew on the hills just outside of Market Chipping, and sit on a stool and talk to her while she frosted wedding cakes.  She baked and read Lettie's letters about magic spells and Irish setters and sheepdogs; she baked and fretted over Sophie, who hadn't appeared to have left the hat shop since Mr. Hatter died.

It turns out that baking was quite a lot like magic indeed.  It was as Mrs. Fairfax had often told her in those two weeks.  "It's the practice more than talent that makes a witch a witch, dear," Mrs. Fairfax had been fond of saying.  Martha kept baking, and some of her creations were staring to get some notice.

"Your plum cake was a sucess, Lettie," Florence told Martha ecstatically.  "Agnes Campbell couldn't stop raving over it.  She said her husband had it for dinner and immediately promised to take her Italy for Easter.  She says it was all Lettie's cake."

"Of course it was," Martha said glumly.  "It was bound to be." Martha just could not stop being successful at things, even if she did not want or mean to be.  Martha baked a batch of honey cakes and did some of the thinking she only seemed able to do when she was moving.  She kept thinking, more and more, that she would rather see what interesting, helpful things Michael came up with every day for the rest of her life than have any of the bouquets or bits of jewelry or poems from any of the rest of the young men who liked her to laugh at them.  

Would Michael propose, like the other young men had? she kept wondering.  If Michael proposed, Martha rather thought she would say yes.  But - it just seemed to Martha that she would miss the hustle and bustle of the pastry shop.  She would miss shouting and jostling through crowds and laughing with the other apprentices. She could have gone on with things just being like they were forever.  

But after all, Martha told herself, this was her fortune.  She had cast her spell to find a young man she liked well enough to start her happily-ever-after with.  And now she had found one.  Martha knew that she ought to start telling Michael and the other apprentices that her name was not really Lettie.  And Michael ought to know about her fortune, as the youngest of three.  But it suddenly seemed very difficult to do.  And why should she stir things up now, just when things were starting to get fun?  So she put off telling Michael for another day, and then another.

The young men still crowded around the counter, but now there were customers lining up outside Cesari’s for what seemed to be a different reason.  Cesari's sweets were highly in demand these days.  It was said that their fig puddings, if purchased after a fight with one's better half, could make amends, and that Cesari's wedding cakes were sure to mean a sunny day for a wedding, and promised and long and fruitful marriage in the bargin.  And Cesari's sponge cakes were rumored to raise the purchaser high in the esteem of other ladies if served for an afternoon tea.

 

That week, Cesari’s was doing a roaring trade in honey cakes.  People came all the way from Porthaven to buy them. It seemed everyone in town had weddings on the mind.  Proposals seemed to be all the rage at the moment. The next morning, three of Lettie’s school friends came into Cesari's to tell her excitedly about their engagements and show her their rings.  

One proposal happened right there in Cesari's in front of Martha's eyes.  A young lady had exclaimed over one of Martha's honey cakes, saying that she might could marry whoever bought her a slice.  A young man had turned around, looked at her, and ordered the entire cake. It was to be served at their wedding the next afternoon. When Martha baked her next batch of honey cakes, she thought of Mrs. Fairfax and grinned.

Martha had been so busy thinking about Michael and her fortune that she hadn’t noticed her spell was wearing off until Nellie took the fresh tray of honey cakes out of her hands and stopped and stared.  “Lettie,” said Nellie curiously, “you seem...different, somehow. Has your hair always been so light?”

“It must be the flour,” Martha said briskly.  “It gets everywhere.” And it did. Flour gets everywhere, all the time, when one lives above a pastry shop.  Martha found flour in her stockings, the pockets of her apron, smeared across her cheeks when she stopped to look in the mirror each night. But that night, when she took off her apron and hung it on the peg by her bed, she leaned forward and looked hard at the girl in the mirror.  She had grown used to seeing Lettie’s blue eyes and dark hair in the mirror. But now she could see her own gray eyes peering anxiously back at her, and she could see that Lettie’s glossy dark curls had faded to a light brown and straightened out.

Martha felt her heart sink.  “Oh dear,” she said.

She knew now she would have to become herself again.  But then she realized she did not know how. How do you tell the people you've laughed and joked with for months that you're not who they think you are?  And there was Michael. Martha quite liked the way Michael called her Lettie . He certainly appeared to admire Lettie's dark curls and plump hands. Would he still like her when he found out?  

It was strange.  Up until now, Martha had been merrily going along, content to let everyone think she was Lettie, and knowing that when the time came she could step right back into being Martha, like changing a dress.  Like switching out one's winter clothes for pink lawn and muslin in the spring. Martha was discovering that it was difficult to change people.  

 


End file.
